The increasingly intense competitive struggle at the frontier of digital life - among Amazon, Google, and Apple, over the marketing of e-books, for instance - is a great example of the power of trustability when it comes to business. These three giants of the digital industry have each based their business success on earning and keeping the trust of their customers.
Remarking on the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980's, during which more than a million people died and both sides were guilty of terrible atrocities, Henry Kissinger was said to have remarked that it was too bad they couldn't both lose. Today, when I look at the struggle going on in the e-book space among Amazon, Apple, and Google, I find myself hoping that they all three can win. They probably won't all three win, however, and my prediction is that the battle will likely go to the competitor most willing to put the customer's own interest at the center of its strategy. And even though I'm a very loyal Amazon customer and Kindle user, right now my money would be on Google.
Amazon, of course, is a company with a legendary reputation for putting customers first, and I've written about it extensively elsewhere on this blog. Anyone who hasn't lived in a closet for the last decade or so will already be familiar with the way Amazon looks out for the interests of customers above all else.
Apple benefits from a tremendous reputation for "cool" software and products, and its philosophy is highly attuned to customer interests. My Peppers & Rogers Group colleague Orkun Oguz just wrote about this factor in Apple's success (among other companies struggling through the downturn). Apple has a long history of acting in its customers' interests, even when this sometimes runs counter to the company's own short-term financial interests. In April 2006, for instance, when Apple reported somewhat weaker-than-expected retail sales, one financial analyst saw the slump as a temporary trade-off designed to earn the trust of its customers. AmTech's Shaw Wu noted that his firm was "not too bothered" by Apple's disappointing numbers that quarter, "as we believe most of the weakness was seasonal and from our checks, Apple's sales representatives have been instructed not to push PowerPC Macs [on] customers who want to wait for Intel versions." Wu went on to say that "[i]n this day and age where making numbers is important, we believe Apple is in a rare group of companies willing to sacrifice its near-term revenue opportunity for greater longer-term success by developing customer trust." (See Wu's analysis here.)
And Google is almost maniacally obsessed with acting in the interests of its user base - the ordinary consumers who rely on its search engine and other products. Several books about the Google phenomenon have documented this, but one of the best written is Ken Auletta's Googled: The End of the World As We Know It (2009).
So now these three highly customer-oriented firms have tossed their digital hats into the e-book ring. Of the three e-book products, however, it seems to me that Google Editions is the one most designed with customer interests in mind. Both Amazon and Apple are so far competing in the e-book space with proprietary, closed products - the Kindle and the iPad - while Google seems intent on maintaining as much openness as possible with Google Editions. Nevertheless, it's very gratifying to see three such customer-centric firms fashioning a competitive struggle around which of them can be most customer-oriented. I sure wish they could all three win!
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